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From Loss

David Harsent

XIX

This room now: papers and books: a long drift over tablesover chairs to the floor. She said: ‘You’ll find him hereup to his arse in the tar-pits of poetry: find him lostin some landscape of the mind: the mind’s perfect drearsalt-marsh-as-moonscape-as-snowscape-as-white-over-whitewhich is limitless from skyline to skyline.’ She said: ‘Thereare ghosts here that crowd and jostle: they feed off silencesand wait for nightfall.’ And: ‘I will turn cards to findwhat’s left for him: what’s left for me.’ Sometimeshe lies down with these rejects. His finger-bones achehe imagines them blacked by a lifelong seepage of ink.Among the crosshatch of deletions one line untouched:She said: ‘This comes not from the scar but from the wound.’With that a shift in her womb: the unnamed child.

She is the girl waitingat the crossroads aboutthe dead hour of the nightin the face of fiers magykand whispers from the gibbetready to haul you downand hold you fast no matterwhat ugliness you come to.She is your lost brideand the heart’s failsafe.Full moon in midwinter stillnessis death in abeyanceas blood slows and youare held in that pale lightfrost-fall and a caught breath. There is no true healingnot at the well of sorrowsnot at the whipping-post notat the communion rail –Christ’s firebreak: not inthe hall of mirrors whereyou are set to rightsnot in the basement barwhere you sit downto a whisky-chainand fall and rise and fallback into a raw dawn lightover high-rise slumlandwhose people each new daygo blind to daybreak:numb to the toxic wind.You know too welltheir turf-war battle songstheir live-by/die-by graffitiyou know their stopless need.Somewhere far from thisa cloudburst hitsthe clitterfield. A hawkrides the thunderhead.It is sure evidence of gracethat stones glowin a tarnished lightthat the sound of the sea pushes back againstthe sound of the rainthat she can bring you herewith a gesture that setsyou and stones and birdin the churn of the weatherand the arc of the sublime.

Prayers are raised against havoc and harm.Tyranny goes by another name. Word is sent from the sightless to the dumb.The storm-horse gallops through the fire-storm.